Who do you think should pick the elected leaders of the United States?

My old friend did it again. He’s a good bellwether for far-right conservative thinking, because he is a born-again fundamentalist Christian, far-right libertarian who thinks abortion is murder and that women should be ruled by men because, well, women are women, and the Bible supports what he thinks. He reads far-right writers, and he watches and listens to far-right media. If he thinks something, you can easily guess where he is getting his ideas.

Anyway, he recently wrote in an e-mail: “You’ve probably heard Churchill’s comment on democracy – ‘It’s the worse form of government except for all the others.’ This can be said about money and elections also – ‘The rich are the worse ones to choose our leaders except for all others.’ Society can be looked at as composed of various groups – rich, poor, artists, criminals, theologians, those living on welfare, students, men, and woman – a…

6 responses to “Who do you think should pick the elected leaders of the United States?”

From what I’ve learned over time, the U.S. Founding Fathers didn’t create a democracy. They created a Republic with checks and balances designed to contain and control the mob so we wouldn’t have a total democracy and the dangers democracy brings with it. They even created a Republic that didn’t allow anyone who didn’t own property—or women or Jews or minorities—to vote.

I think minority black men got the vote first soon after the Civil War and there has been a mob of whites (not all whites but too many) who have struggled to limit or get rid of that privilege for blacks to vote for just as long. I don’t know when men who didn’t own property got the vote. I don’t know when other minorities got the vote. I think the Chinese were last among the minorities thanks to the Chinese Exclusion Act that was probably a racist, knee jerk reaction from another democratic mob just like McCarthy era that went after anyone even suspected of thinking socialist or communist thoughts. Women got the vote last and they are still struggling for equal rights to men while a mob that mostly belongs to the Republican Party fights to make sure women never have equal rights to men.

What we have today is a struggle between democracy, the republic the founding fathers gave us, an oligarchy, and of course Trump, who wants a dictatorship or monarchy if he is ever elected and gets his way, because most of what he says he will do will only happen if he got rid of the U.S. Congress and U.S. Supreme Court and was crowned an emperor or king.

The way we learned it when I was in school — way back when you could still see Burma Shave jingles on rural roads and two-lane blacktops — a republic in the modern sense was defined as a representative democracy.

Everyone understood the gap between the ideal and the implementation, especially in the rough draft and ready prototype, but one-person one-vote was the big ideal and it gradually worked its way into successive roll-outs.

Of course all yer latter day corporate apologists have latched onto the idea that America is not Athens or something, because that lets them get away with stumping for a social contract where anything goes so long as the Board of Directors can game the system to get it.

Like Trump and the other billionaires that are gaming the system to get what they want, and it is obvious they don’t want a republic or a representative democracy with checks and balances. In fact, it is arguable, the oligarchs want to get rid of all the checks and balances that apply to them.